Cowboys Stadium

The Nov. 13 super-welterweight title fight between Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito will land at Cowboys Stadium outside Dallas, a source close to site negotiations told The Times on Monday. Former world welterweight champion Margarito is scheduled to appear Wednesday before the California State Athletic Commission in hopes of regaining his boxing license. He was stripped of his license after authorities confiscated plaster inserts from inside his hand wrap before his January 2009 title defense against Shane Mosley at Staples Center.

Lest you think I am merely another pretty-boy sportswriter, I offer up this serious proposal: a new NFL stadium, at the corner of 2nd and Spring streets in downtown Los Angeles. Sure, there's a major newspaper there now ? this one ? but don't mind that. This is the perfect location, right across the street from the LAPD and catty-corner from City Hall. It represents a holy trinity: media, cops, crooks. When some city inspector is busted for taking a bribe, we'll get that story to you yesterday.

Snow, ice and frigid temperatures made driving treacherous Friday and led to a freak accident at Cowboys Stadium that sent six people to the hospital. The injuries ? one of them critical ? were to contractors hired by the NFL to prepare the stadium for Super Bowl XLV. Snow and ice fell from the stadium's roof. None of the injuries was considered life threatening. Meanwhile, as much as five inches of snow fell overnight, leading to canceled and delayed flights and roadways strewn with disabled cars.

Ticket-holding football fans who ended up with no seats or what they considered bad views of the Super Bowl have filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys and team owner Jerry Jones. The federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in Dallas alleges breach of contract, fraud and deceptive sales practices on behalf of people who ended up watching the game on TV at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, or had seats the lawsuit labeled "illegitimate. " The NFL had announced hours before the Green Bay Packers played the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday that about 1,250 temporary seats were deemed unsafe, and the league scrambled to find new seats for about 850 people.

Don't worry about the confrontation involving Dallas Cowboys cornerback Terence Newman and secondary coach Dave Campo. Their heated conversation in the first half of Sunday's game against Washington that escalated to Newman's shoving Campo? Newman joked it was nothing more than to promote a fight that would be on the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr. undercard. "It's going to happen in Vegas," Newman told ESPNDallas.com. "It's going down. We've got Don King promoting. You know?

The NBA All-Star game is coming to the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in 2010 and plenty of seats are available -- more than 100,000. The Dallas Mavericks and Cowboys are collaborating on hosting next season's showcase event. It will be among the first major events at the soon-to-be-completed, $1.1-billion facility in nearby Arlington. The event should set the record for the largest crowd to watch an NBA game, shattering the mark of 44,735 set at the 1989 All-Star game at the Houston Astrodome.

Having visited the palace Sunday, New York Giants linebacker Danny Clark came away less than overly impressed with Jerry Jones' new $1.1-billion Cowboys Stadium. Clark told Sirius XM satellite radio that the visiting locker room inside the stadium features few creature comforts. "There's not a lot of hot water in there," Clark said. "[Jones] cut some corners in the bathroom there." Clark also was dismissive of the noise factor created by an NFL-record crowd of 105,121. "It wasn't as loud as you would think 105,000 people would be," he said.

The state of Texas on Thursday issued a boxing license to Antonio Margarito 17 months after California revoked the Mexican boxer's license for nearly taking gloves loaded with plaster inserts into a January 2009 fight at Staples Center. The decision by Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation Executive Director William Kuntz paves the way for Margarito, the former world welterweight champion, to fight Manny Pacquiao for a world super-welterweight belt Nov. 13 at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.

Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High got to open its season Monday night at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the Knights' football trip turned out to be a productive one. Running back Kenny Boggs scored three touchdowns, and quarterback Ryan Kasdorf completed his first nine passes and finished 16 for 24 for 193 yards and one touchdown to help the Knights defeat Spring (Texas) Klein Oak, 37-7. Notre Dame players wanted to be a good representative for California high school football, and they executed on both sides of the ball, limiting their mistakes while relying on their spread offense to control the clock and the game.

Suspended boxer Antonio Margarito, former world champion at 147 pounds, will not fight in a semi-main event prior to the Manny Pacquiao-Joshua Clottey fight March 13 at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas. Bob Arum of Top Rank, Margarito's promoter, said that Margarito would fight instead on a card May 8 in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Margarito (37-6, 27 KOs) was suspended by the California State Athletic Commission after his upset loss to Shane Mosley at Staples Center in January 2009. Mosley's trainer discovered prior to that fight that Margarito had a plaster-like substance in the hand wraps under his gloves.

A day after Super Bowl XLV, the NFL was still dealing with fallout from the Cowboys Stadium seating fiasco ? and the headache could linger for months. Roughly 1,250 spectators in six sections of the stadium were relocated or had to watch the game on monitors because their temporary seats ? installed for the game ? weren't ready. The sections in the upper deck above one end zone were not completed because the railings had not been installed and/or the stairs and risers were not sufficiently tightened.

If everything works out for them in Super Bowl XLV, the Green Bay Packers will hit the wall. Specifically, they want to adorn the wall of their meeting room at Lambeau Field, where grainy photos of every Packers championship team now hang; pictures that include players such as Bart Starr, Ray Nitschke, Herb Adderley and Brett Favre. A space has already been cleared for this season's team. "I thought it would be a cool thing for us to see every day in the meeting room," said quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who lobbied for the blank space.

Snow, ice and frigid temperatures made driving treacherous Friday and led to a freak accident at Cowboys Stadium that sent six people to the hospital. The injuries ? one of them critical ? were to contractors hired by the NFL to prepare the stadium for Super Bowl XLV. Snow and ice fell from the stadium's roof. None of the injuries was considered life threatening. Meanwhile, as much as five inches of snow fell overnight, leading to canceled and delayed flights and roadways strewn with disabled cars.

COTTON BOWL Louisiana State vs. Texas A&M When: Friday, 5 p.m. PST. Where: Cowboys Stadium, Arlington, Texas On the air: Channel 11. About No. 11 Louisiana State (10-2): The Tigers, led by All-American cornerback Patrick Peterson, ranked second in the Southeastern Conference in total defense. An inconsistent offense ranked in the bottom third of the SEC in many categories, and was last in passing. Of course, Coach Les Miles always has something up his sleeve ?

If the three competing designs for a football stadium in downtown Los Angeles released Wednesday were an NFL division, they'd be the NFC West. As is the case with that sorry division ? which is now led by a pair of teams with losing records, the Seattle Seahawks and the St. Louis Rams ? one of the stadium proposals eventually will win the design competition put together by entertainment giant AEG. But that doesn't mean it'll do much more than limp to victory ? or to elevate the conversation about the kind of large-scale civic architecture we want or need in downtown L.A. and across the region.

Manny Pacquiao realized a few weeks ago his attempt to make the 150-pound catchweight limit for his Saturday night junior-middleweight title fight against Antonio Margarito would be detrimental to his brilliant speed. On Friday, the champion boxer who enjoys gambling publicly revealed the boldness of his belief as if he was announcing, "All in!" at the poker table. Pacquiao weighed in at a surprisingly low 144.6 pounds, and there's a good chance Magarito, who weighed in at 150 pounds, will step into the Cowboys Stadium ring at 160. "I'm not worried," Pacquiao said, walking off the stage at Cowboys Stadium.

COTTON BOWL Louisiana State vs. Texas A&M When: Friday, 5 p.m. PST. Where: Cowboys Stadium, Arlington, Texas On the air: Channel 11. About No. 11 Louisiana State (10-2): The Tigers, led by All-American cornerback Patrick Peterson, ranked second in the Southeastern Conference in total defense. An inconsistent offense ranked in the bottom third of the SEC in many categories, and was last in passing. Of course, Coach Les Miles always has something up his sleeve ?

Basketball history was made Sunday night. Never before had so many paid so much to watch from so far away. Putting a memorable stamp on what would have been another high-scoring, forgettable game in an increasingly forgettable series, the East beat the West, 141-139, in the greatest All-Star game in NBA history . . . at least, attendance-wise. With 108,713 in Cowboys Stadium, at premium prices up to $500 for however many of the field-level seats that weren't given to corporate sponsors, it was the biggest crowd for any game, or exhibition, in basketball history.

Here we are, in Texas, of all places, for Saturday's Manny Pacquiao-Antonio Margarito fight. We should be in Las Vegas. Las Vegas was made for pro boxing. Vegas is lots of bright lights and lots of dim bulbs losing the rent money. It is noisy, garish and loose with the truth, same as boxing. If they put them in eHarmony's computer, they'd end up married. Right now, thousands of Southern California fight fans should be doing as they always do for big fights ? exceed the speed limit on Interstate 15 to rush to the weigh-in, that Friday afternoon prefight ceremony that remains one of the stupidest exercises in all of sport.

The low blows started before Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito stepped into the ring. In a video that appeared on various websites Tuesday, Margarito, his trainer Robert Garcia and Oxnard fighter Brandon Rios mocked the symptoms of Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach, who has Parkinson's disease. "I had trouble sleeping last night," Roach said Wednesday after reviewing the video. "I want to fight all those guys myself, but I'm too old. ? I'll never talk to any of those guys again.